The Summer We Got Free (14 page)

***

The whole house smelled of acrylic paint. Geo slid
down the stairs on his butt, the way he liked to do, and landed with a soft
thud in the foyer. He saw his father sitting in the living room, reading his
newspaper, and he skipped over to him and climbed up onto his lap.

George frowned, took one hand off his newspaper and grabbed
Geo’s arm, and pushed him off onto the sofa. “You too old for that.”

Geo blinked at him and rubbed the place on his arm
where his father had grabbed him. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Stop crying,” George said. “You aint a baby.”

Geo wiped his eyes and left the room.

Ava was sitting in front of the makeshift easel their
father had constructed for her out of pieces of discarded wood he had found
while working around the city and had put together at their mother’s request.
All around her, tubes of paint were strewn, as she sat finishing a portrait of
their father she had been working on since just after breakfast. Examining her
work, she tilted her head to one side and tried to think what was missing.

She smelled butterscotch and knew Geo was near, and a few
seconds later he appeared at her side. “Let’s go make a snow fort with Kenny
and them,” he said.

“Hold up a minute.”

Geo came over to Ava and looked at the painting of
their father, with a large yellow beak instead of a nose. He shook his head.
“Daddy aint gone like that.”

Ava looked at him. “It’s good.”

“Yeah. But Daddy won’t like it one bit.”

Ava didn’t care what her father would think about the
painting. She never cared what anyone thought about her art. At school, she
felt equally indifferent to her teacher’s praise over something beautiful she
had drawn as to her shock and disapproval when Ava made something she deemed
“inappropriate,” as she had when, a few weeks before, Ava had sketched the
school janitor, Mr. Ennis, in a woman’s dress and heels, and red lipstick. She
had painted him that way after seeing him stand up to a teacher who was talking
down to him and she had decided he was bold and interesting, two things she
associated mostly with women and the color red. Her teacher, Miss
Hoffs
, had not approved, and that evening she had called
the house and told Regina that Ava had been disrespectful to Mr. Ennis.

“No, I wasn’t,” Ava had insisted. “I painted him like
that because I like him. He’s brave.”

“That don’t make sense,” Regina had said. “Men don’t
wear dresses, it aint natural.”

Ava did not think wearing dresses was natural for
anybody, but she did not argue with Regina.

“If Daddy don’t get it,” Ava said now, to Geo, “that’s
just too bad for him.”

Geo had heard Ava express this sentiment before, and
he thought of it as one of the things that defined her, that made her different
from other people, different, even, from himself. Ava did not need or desire to
be seen or understood. At school, at church, even playing on the block with
their friends, Ava was never the least concerned with other people’s understanding,
or misunderstanding, of her. Often, when playing dolls with the girls on the
block, Ava would suddenly become interested in the
dodgeball
game the boys were having in the street, and when the girls protested her
leaving and joining the boys, insisting girls didn’t play
dodgeball
,
calling her
tomboy
, or even, once or
twice,
dyke
, Ava never bothered
defending herself, never insisted she wasn’t a tomboy or a dyke, never extolled
the virtues of
dodgeball
, nor the downside of dolls.
She went and did what she wanted to do.

“I know what’s missing,” Ava said, and Geo watched as
she painted bars around their father, making a birdcage that was a little too
small for him.
 

When George came out of the living room on his way to
the kitchen, he frowned upon seeing the twins. “It’s snowing out,” he said.
“Y’all love the snow. Why y’all inside?”

“We about to go make forts in a minute, Daddy,” Geo
said. “Come with us.”

George frowned. “Boy, you know grown men don’t play in
the snow.”

As George passed
them, he craned his neck to see what Ava was painting. “That’s a nice birdie,”
he said. Then, squinting, he came over to the easel and peered closer. Ava
watched his face, saw the corners of his mouth turn down a little bit. “That
supposed to be me?”

Ava nodded.

George folded
his arms across his chest. “Why in the world would you draw me like that?”

She shrugged. “I
saw you sitting on the sofa by yourself, and you was humming, and you looked
real small and trapped.”

The frown on her father’s lips turned into an angry
scowl and spread to his forehead, his eyebrows drawing close together. “You
shouldn’t be spying on people, Ava.”

“I wasn’t! I was just walking by.” She frowned, shook
her head. “You have a paranoid nature, Daddy.”

“Aint you supposed to be painting
horsies
and kitties, anyhow? Aint you supposed to be nine?”

She shrugged.

“Y’all go outside. Now,” he said, and walked off into
the kitchen.

While they were getting on their coats and hats and
mittens, Regina came downstairs, headed for the front door.

“Mama, where you going?”

“Just over to the Ellis’, to get my pie plate,” she
said, putting on her coat. She had been baking pies all week, getting ready for
their Christmas party, and the house had smelled like warm fruit and butter for
days and days. They followed her outside and while they hurried down the street
to build snow forts, Regina crossed the street to the Ellis house and was about
to ring the bell when Chuck opened the door. He was on his way out, pulling on
his coat. He smiled when he saw her and asked how she was doing.

“Good, Chuck. And you?”

“Can’t complain,” he said. “Well, I can, but I guess I
won’t. I’m on my way over to the church, but you go on in. Lena’s upstairs.”

Regina found Lena in one of the front bedrooms and the
way she was moving around in
there
, with her head
lowered and her shoulders slumped, made Regina stop a few feet from the open
door and watch her. She was straightening up the room, picking up Chuck’s socks
and tossing them into the hamper against the wall. She then placed a couple of
pairs of his shoes neatly by the foot of the bed. The worn brown jacket Chuck
always wore was thrown over a chair, and Lena picked it up, and held it against
herself for a long moment, smoothing the wrinkles out of it with her palm,
slowly, her mouth set in a thoughtful frown. Regina watched as she carried it
over to the closet and hung it up there, then crossed back to the bed, where a
striped necktie was draped over the headboard. She pulled it off, folding it
carefully, bringing it up to her nose and inhaling the scent of it, her eyes
closing a moment, before she finally placed it in a dresser drawer. Regina
continued to stand there outside the door as Lena made the bed, tucking the
yellow bedspread under and pausing to examine a loose thread that hung at the
edge of the blanket. She ran it through her fingers a few times, slowly, deliberately,
before finally wrapping it around her forefinger and yanking it off. She sat
down at the end of the bed and stared at the thread, peered at it for a long
moment, as if it were a living thing and she was waiting for it to do something
interesting.

“Lena?” Regina
called, deciding it was past time to make herself known.

Surprised, Lena
turned and blinked at Regina.

“Chuck told me
to come on up. Sorry to barge in on you.”

Lena pulled the
thread off her finger and enclosed it tightly in her hand. “Oh, it’s alright,
Regina,” she said, getting up and moving to the door. “Come on back downstairs
and I’ll get that pie plate for you.”

Regina reached
out and touched Lena’s arm. “You alright, girl?”

Lena smiled.
“I’m fine. Why you asking?”

“You looked a
little sad just then.”

“I was just
thinking about my mother,” she said.

“Oh,” said
Regina. “I never met her, have I?”

“Oh, no,” Lena
said, shaking her head. “I was just thinking how she never married my father.
And she used to always say that a woman was better off on her own, living her
life on her own terms. Even if it made her life harder in some ways.”

“Well, there’s
probably some truth in that,” Regina said.

“You know, I was
thinking that, too,” Lena said. “But, you know what? She was dead before she
was forty. That’s how hard her life was.”

“I’m sorry,”
Regina said, and could think of nothing else to say.

“Oh, it’s
alright,”
Lena
said.

That was something Lena said often: that things were
alright
. They never really seemed to be, though, not
entirely. With Lena, there was always something just a little bit off. Like the
way she was never late for anything, was always right on time, but she always
managed to forget something important, often showing up to bible study without
her bible, or to an appointment at the veterinarian having left her cat behind
at home. She was always very neatly groomed, her clothes flawlessly pressed,
her shoes without a scuff. But there was always one strand of hair coming loose
from the bun she wore, or a short run up the back of her stockings, or lipstick
on her teeth.

When they got
down to the kitchen, Lena offered Regina lemonade, and Regina sat down while
Lena got the pitcher from the refrigerator and poured each of them a glass. As
usual, it wasn’t sweet enough, but Regina smiled and said, “Thank you. That’s
good.”

“Sweet enough?”

“Oh yeah.”

Regina offered
her a cigarette, and they both smoked and sipped their lemonade, and a couple
of minutes passed in silence. Then Lena said, “Our husbands sure do get along
well.”

Regina felt a
rush of warmth around her ears and the lemonade tingled bitterly at the back of
her throat. She nodded. “I guess they do. Chuck’s a nice man; everybody seem to
get along with him.”

Lena smiled,
nodded. “Of course.
George, too.
Everybody
like him.
But that aint what I mean.
It
seem
to be something particular between the two of them.
Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.
What you mean?”

“What you think
I mean, Regina?” she asked, and sipped her lemonade.

“Well, they good
friends. You mean that? Or something else?” Regina hoped she did not mean
something else. She had spent months, years, trying not to think about
something else, and she was not prepared—sitting here drinking this
not-sweet-enough lemonade, in this kitchen that was spotless except for three
drops of what looked like spaghetti sauce on the linoleum—for Lena, plain
old Lena, who never had anything interesting to say, to suddenly start talking
about George and Chuck and
something else
.

“I just get a
strange feeling sometimes,” Lena said. “When George is around. Like there aint
no space for me in the room no more. Like I aint there. You ever get that
feeling?”

Regina did not
answer.

“I think the
devil’s trying to get a hold of my husband. You know?”

Regina shook her
head. “No, I don’t know. I’m afraid you gone have to say what you mean, and say
it plain, ‘cause I got pies to bake and children to look after, and I can’t sit
here a whole lot longer playing guessing games.”

Lena looked
surprised at Regina’s tone, which was soft but slicing. She smiled. “I guess
it’s what you said. They good friends, that’s all. Aint nothing wrong with
that, is there?”

Regina got up
from the table. “Do you mind if I take my pie plate now?”

Lena got up and
retrieved the pie plate from a cupboard and handed it to Regina, who turned for
the door.

“Regina, I’m
sorry,” Lena said. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

Regina stopped
and looked at her, and couldn’t help but feel for her. She understood the
questions, the need to know. But she also felt that her life, everything she
knew, depended on not asking, on not knowing. “My Ava asks a lot of questions,”
Regina said. “She
want
to know everything. I always
think she gone have a hard life if she keep that up. ‘Cause what if, once the
questions get answered, it aint nothing left to hold on to?”

Lena just stared
at her.

Regina turned to
leave again, and again Lena called out to her. “Regina, what you think it would
feel like to be free?”

“What you mean,
free?”

“I mean, to be
able to live your life just the way you want to, to be just who you are. To not
have to do what anybody say you ought to do, not white folks, or the bible,
maybe not even God. What you think that would be like?”

Regina had no
idea what Lena was talking about.

A little while
later, as she was crossing the street with the pie plate, and the taste of sour
lemons in her mouth, she saw Ava, dancing in the snow, laughing, and she
laughed herself, feeling warmer out in the sunshine, and waved to her daughter.